CS&E Labs 

As a part of the new Computational Sciences and Engineering program, room CS111 in the Computer Sciences Building at Purdue University has been designated the CS&ELab. This room, in conjunction with the research work being done for the SciencePad and Softlab projects will be converted into a prototype electronic classroom and laboratory of the future.

The electronic classroom and laboratory will contain a variety of stationary multimedia machines connected by a high speed network. In addition, the students and instructors will have notebook machines connected to each other and to the wired network using wireless networks. The wireless network will use an infrared (IR) component to transmit control and security information, and a radio frequency (RF) network to transmit data signals. There will be a computer controlled projection system for presentations.

In addition, there will be audio (CD/DAT) and video (Optical Disk/S-VHS) systems which will also be computer controllable. There will be a "LiveBoard" for interactive discussions. Some virtual reality hardware will be used to bring in the telepresence dimension to the class and laboratory. In addition, the experimental equipment in the associated laboratories will all be computer controlled using General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) like systems.

The scenario adopted for an electronic classroom assumes that the students and instructor have notebook computers running SciencePad and LiveBoard to interact with one another. SciencePad will be used for a wide variety of tasks, including taking notes, receiving and submitting homeworks, monitoring student progress, and supporting the problem solving processes and experimentation required by each course.

In the classroom setting, the student's notepad will continuously receive the material that the instructor is putting on the liveboard. The students can save a "page" anytime, and annotate it with their own comments. Videoconferencing facilities will allow lectures by outside speakers and students will interact with them using SciencePad. SciencePad will also allow them to access course related material, including video and audio tapes of a lecture from their dorm rooms. Various security protocols will be used to regulate access. For instance, students should be able to access exam questions only during a certain period while they are in class and they might not be allowed to access the slides prepared by the instructor for a lecture without coming to class. To make the remote interactions as natural as possible we will experiment with existing virtual reality equipment to create a telepresence environment.

SciencePad in the laboratory is an intelligent tool to assist in the scientist's work. This assisting process traverses the entire gamut from being a simple notebook for storing text to being a mechanism for gathering data from experimental processes and using them in later work. This latter aspect is the subject of the SoftLab project.